Africa should see the first COVID-19 vaccine doses in March from the global COVAX effort aimed at helping lower-income countries obtain the shots, the World Health Organization’s Africa chief said Thursday, as deaths on the continent are rapidly rising. Matshidiso Moeti told reporters that a larger rollout of the millions of doses from COVAX is […]
Antibodies against the novel coronavirus may not work as well against a new variant of the virus identified in South Africa, early data suggest. Scientists recently raised concerns that the variant, known as 501.V2, may be resistant to COVID-19 vaccines, Live Science previously reported. Experts noted that the variant has accumulated a significant number of […]
Africa’s coronavirus outbreak may have passed its peak, the World Health Organization (WHO) continental chief said Tuesday, warning against complacency to avoid a second wave. WHO Africa regional director Matshidiso Moeti told a conference of African health ministers that numbers of new cases were declining. “We are seeing that we have had what seems to […]
Average daily cases of coronavirus in Africa fell last week, a “hopeful sign” for the continent’s fight against the disease, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) said Thursday. The continent-wide daily average was 10,300 last week, down from 11,000 the week before, Dr. John Nkengasong said at a […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain More than 10,000 people have died from coronavirus in South Africa since the pandemic arrived in the country in March, the health ministry said Saturday. The continent’s most industrialised economy has registered 553,188 infections, more than half of the continental caseload, and the fifth biggest number of COVID-19 cases in the […]
South Africa on Tuesday surpassed the U.K. in its number of confirmed coronavirus cases as the country’s president warns of “the gravest crisis in the history of our democracy.” South Africa now has the world’s eighth-highest number of cases at 298,292, which represents nearly half of all the confirmed cases on the African continent. That’s […]
(HealthDay)—Without quick action, the new coronavirus could sicken up to a quarter-billion people in Africa during the pandemic’s first year and claim 190,000 lives, a new modeling forecast suggests. Up to 5.5 million people could require hospitalization, 140,000 could have severe COVID-19, and 89,000 would be critically ill, the World Health Organization study says. The […]
Nearly a quarter of a billion people across Africa will catch coronavirus during the first year of the pandemic, and up to 190,000 of them will likely die, unless urgent action is taken to control the infection, reveals a predictive modelling study, accepted for publication in BMJ Global Health. These figures indicate a lower rate […]
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday prolonged by a further 14 days a three-week national lockdown aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, as infections notched up to 1,934. “After careful consideration of the available evidence, the national coronavirus command council has decided to extend the nationwide lockdown by a further two weeks […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Six of Africa’s 54 nations are among the last in the world yet to report cases of the new coronavirus. The global pandemic has been confirmed in almost every country, but for a handful of far-flung tiny island states, war-torn Yemen and isolated North Korea. In Africa authorities claim they are […]
